I'm Brianne. I'm a homeschooling mom of one, continuously refining my methods and expectations. My current philosophy is to refrain from picking my child's path in life, but instead to give her the tools to read the map and choose her own.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Spelling

I may have mentioned previously how we've gone to a more traditional "school model" for how we're handling spelling right now. It's definitely not ideal, but until things settle down, it's something that's working for us. So Shannon gets a list of words on Monday to write 1-3 times each, the list comes from suggested words out of MBTP, at least one 'challenge' word, and I've started trying to add vocabulary words out of her literature, science, or social studies unit.

On Tuesday, she writes sentences for each word. Wednesdays she reviews independently and is doing a good job of writing the words she thinks she'll have trouble with. Thursdays we test. Any words missed on test day will be carried over to the following week. Ever since the first week, she has gotten 100% on her tests, and that's great. I think the word lists are a bit unchallenging but we'll ramp it up if we need to. Again, it's the routine I'm working with first until we get comfortable with it.

Tuesdays are her favorite days, as we've found a great way to get Dad involved. She now saves her sentence writing until he gets home, and they sit across the desk from each other. She gives him three random words (or not-so-random, usually objects she can see in the room) while she forms a single sentence out of three of her spelling words. Dad's job, however, is to write a haiku with his words. All of us love this solution. Sean's haikus are usually hilarious (writing for his audience, after all) and his solutions have really stirred Shannon's creative juices to reach for more and more interesting sentences. She often tries to write in haiku herself, and has a pretty good handle on it. Hooray for creativity!